Status of This Document
This section describes the status of this
document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C
publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found
in the W3C technical reports index at
https://www.w3.org/TR/.
This document describes and prioritises gaps for the support of Javanese written with the Javanese script on the Web and in eBooks. In particular, it is concerned with text layout. It checks that needed features are supported in W3C specifications, in particular HTML and CSS and those relating to digital publications. It also checks whether the features have been implemented in browsers and ereaders.
It is linked to from the language matrix that tracks Web support for many languages.
This document is an individual contribution, and is not currently a work item in any group, however, you can contact the Internationalization Working Group for more information. We welcome contributions to this and/or other documents.
This document was published by the Internationalization Working Group as
a Group Draft Note using the
Note track.
Group Draft Notes are not endorsed by
W3C nor its Members.
This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other
than work in progress.
The
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does not carry any licensing requirements or commitments on this
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This document is governed by the
2 November 2021 W3C Process Document.
1. Introduction
The W3C needs to make sure that the needs of scripts and languages around the world are built in to technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG, etc. so that Web pages and eBooks can look and behave as people expect around the world.
This page documents difficulties people encounter when trying to use the Javanese language with the Javanese script on the Web.
Having identified an issue, it investigates the current status with regards to web specifications and implementations by user agents (browsers, e-readers, etc.), and attempts to prioritise the severity of the issue for web users.
A summary of this report and others can be found as part of the language matrix.
For a description of the Javanese script see the (non-W3C) page Javanese, which summarises aspects of the orthography and typographic features, including relevant Unicode characters and their use.
1.1 Work flow
This version of the document is a preliminary analysis
Gap analysis work usually starts with a preliminary analysis, conducted quickly by one or a small group of experts. Then a more detailed analysis is carried out, involving a wider range of experts. The detailed analysis may involve the development of tests, in order to illustrate issues and track results for browsers. The next phase is ongoing maintenance. It is expected that the resulting document will not be frozen: as gaps are fixed, this should be noted in the document. It is also possible that new gaps are noticed or arise, and they can be added to this document when that happens.
1.2 Prioritization
This document not only describes gaps, it also attempts to prioritise them in terms of the impact on the local user. The prioritisation is indicated by colour.
Key:
It is important to note that these colours do not indicate to what extent a particular features is broken. They indicate the impact of a broken or missing feature on the content author or end user.
Basic styling is the level that would be generally accepted as sufficient for most Web pages. Advanced level support would include additional features one might expect to include in ebooks or other advanced typographic formats. There may be features of a script or language that are not supported on the Web, but that are not generally regarded as necessary (usually archaic or obscure features). In this case, the feature can be described here, but the status should be marked as OK.
The decision as to what priority level is assigned to a described gap is down to the experts doing the gap analysis. It may not always be straightforward to decide. If a given section in this document refers to more than one feature that is broken, each with different impacts on Web users, the priority for the section should be the lowest denominator.
A cell can be scored as OK if the feature in question is specified in an appropriate specification, and is supported by user agents. A specification that is in CR or later and has two implementations in 'major' browsers will count. This means that the feature may not be supported in all browsers yet. (At some point in the future we may try to distinguish, visually, whether support is available in a specification but still pending in major browsers or applications.)
3. Characters and phrases
3.2 Fonts
Do the standard fallback fonts used in browsers (eg. serif, sans-serif, cursive, etc.) match expectations? Are special font or OpenType features needed for this script that are not available? See available information or check for currently needed data.
#37 Few Javanese fonts available, and they are problematic
There are only a handful of Javanese script fonts. (Google's original Javanese Noto font was disliked, but Google updated it.)
The most popular font appears to be Tuladha Jejeg, but that requires Graphite for rendering, so it only works properly on Firefox.
3.3 Font styles, weight, etc
This covers ways of modifying the glyphs, such as for italicisation, bolding, oblique, etc. Do italic fonts lean in the right direction? Is synthesised italicisation problematic? Are there other problems relating to bolding or italicisation - perhaps relating to generalised assumptions of applicability? See available information or check for currently needed data.
3.4 Glyph shaping and positioning
Does the script in question require additional user control features to support alterations to the position or shape of glyphs, for example adjusting the distance between the base text and diacritics, or changing the glyphs used in a systematic way? Do you need to be able to compose/decompose conjuncts, or show characters that are otherwise hidden, etc? See available information or check for currently needed data.
3.5 Cursive text
If this script is cursive (eg. Arabic, N’Ko, Syriac, etc), are there problems or needed features related to the handling of cursive text? Do cursive links break if parts of a word are marked up or styled? Do Unicode joiner and non-joiner characters behave as expected? See available information or check for currently needed data.
3.8 Grapheme/word segmentation & selection
This is about how text is divided into graphemes, words, sentences, etc., and behaviour associated with that. Do Unicode grapheme clusters appropriately segment character units for your script? When you double- or triple-click on the text, is the expected range of characters highlighted? When you move through the text with the cursor, or backspace, etc. do you see the expected behaviour? (Some of the answers to these questions may be picker up in other sections, such as line-breaking, or initial-letter styling.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
#38 Double-click doesn't highlight a word in Javanese
Double-click doesn't highlight a word. Instead, it highlights a whole phrase between spaces.
3.9 Inline features & punctuation
Are there specific problems related to punctuation or the interaction of the text with punctuation (for example separation of punctuation from previous text, but allowing no line break between)? Are there issues related to handling of abbreviation, ellipsis, or iteration? Are there problems related to bracketing information or demarcating things such as proper nouns, etc? See available information or check for currently needed data.
3.10 Text decoration
This is about ways of marking text (see also specific sections dedicated to quotations and inline notes/annotations). Is it possible to express emphasis or highlight content as expected? Bold, italic and under-/over-lines are not always appropriate, and some scripts have their own unique ways of doing things, that are not in the Western tradition at all. Text delimiters mark certain items or sections off from the main text, such as book names in Chinese, quotations, head markers in Tibetan, etc, and often involve the use of punctuation. Is there any behaviour that isn't well supported, such as overlines for numeric digits in Syriac? Are there issues about the positioning or use of underlines? Some aspects related to the drawing of lines alongside or through text involve local typographic considerations. Do underlines need to be broken in special ways for this script? Do you need support for additional line shapes or widths? Does the distance or position of the lines relative to the text need to vary in ways that are not achievable? Are lines correctly drawn relative to vertical text? See available information or check for currently needed data.
3.11 Quotations
Are there any issues when dealing with quotations marks, especially when nested? Should block quotes be indented or handled specially? See available information or check for currently needed data.
#39 The q element doesn't produce the correct quotation marks for Javanese
Javanese script text doesn't normally use western quote marks to demarcate quotations. Instead, it uses ꧊ [U+A9CA JAVANESE PADA ADEG] or ꧌ [U+A9CC JAVANESE PADA PISELEH] and ꧍ [U+A9CD JAVANESE TURNED PADA PISELEH]. (See issue 8.)
Unfortunately, those characters are not produced by browsers for Javanese written in the Javanese script when the q element is used.
Specs:
css-content says that for the auto value of the quotes property, A typographically appropriate used value for quotes is automatically chosen by the UA based on the content language of the element and/or its parent.
In a note, the spec points developers to CLDR for information about typographically appropriate quotation marks, but CLDR doesn't have data for the Javanese script. The note does, however, go on to say that other sources of information may be appropriate (and if used, should be submitted to CLDR).
Tests & results:
interactive test, direct link
The q element produces western quote marks in Gecko, Blink, and Webkit. (Gecko currently doesn't set default quotes at all based on the language of the content.)
Priority:
Marking this as advanced, because use of the q element is optional. Quote characters can be used instead (although they are sometimes not as convenient), or the content author can add explicit styling for the q element using the quotes property – although that has to be done for every piece of content.
3.12 Inline notes & annotations
The ruby spec currently specifies an initial subset of requirements for fine-tuning the typography of phonetic and semantic annotations of East Asian text, including furigana, pinyin and zhuyin fuhao systems. Is is adequate for what it sets out to do? What other controls will be needed in the future? What about other types of inline annotation, such as warichu? (For referent-type notes such as footnotes, see below.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
4. Lines and Paragraphs
4.1 Line breaking
Does the browser capture the rules about the way text in your script wraps when it hits the end of a line? Does line-breaking wrap whole 'words' at a time, or characters, or something else (such as syllables in Tibetan and Javanese)? What characters should not appear at the end or start of a line, and what should be done to prevent that? See available information or check for currently needed data.
#40 Text wrapping fails without ZWSP
Words are not separated by spaces in the Javanese orthography. Javanese is also one of a small number of scripts where an initial consonant for a word may be subjoined below the final consonant of the preceding word. Because these stacked consonants cannot be split, segmentation for line-breaking, etc. uses orthographic syllables as a unit, where orthographic means a character or stack of characters with all associated combining marks.
Unlike Thai, which uses dictionary lookup to wrap word-by-word, the basic break points in Javanese can be calculated using a grammar for syllables. (There are likely to be additional considerations to check related to punctuation, digits, etc.)
See this discussion for examples.
See also the Hyphenation section for information about use of TALING.
It is possible to fudge things, using CSS properties, so that the text wraps, but the resulting line breaks are not always correct. It is also possible to make the breaking happen by inserting ZWSP at appropriate places, but we cannot expect Javanese users to do that accurately and consistently.
Tests & results:
Interactive test, Text should wrap to the next line at the line end
Gecko and Blink don't wrap at all in rendered HTML. In the textarea, however, lines ARE broken by orthographic syllables in a textarea element. Webkit also fails in HTML. In the textarea it is inconsistent, sometimes wrapping sequences of characters, sometimes orthographic syllables, sometimes longer sequences, sometimes it does the latter then pulls back some characters from the 2nd line as the width continues to shrink.
Interactive test, Text should wrap to the next line at ZWSP
All browser engines tested break lines as expected if ZWSP is inserted between all breakable syllables.
Priority:
This section marked as broken because browsers do not apply the necessary algorithm to to insert line-break opportunities at orthographic syllable boundaries for Javanese text in normal HTML. As a result, a line of text tends to run off the right edge of the window.
See also hyphenation below.
4.2 Hyphenation
Is hyphenation used for your script, or something else? If hyphenation is used, does it work as expected? (Note, this is about line-end hyphenation when text is wrapped, rather than use of the hyphen and related characters as punctuation marks.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
In some texts, when a new line begins with ◌ꦺ [U+A9BA JAVANESE VOWEL SIGN TALING], an additional spacing version of that character is placed at the end of the previous line. (See this discussion for examples.)
"Since hyphenating taling turns out can also be found in handwritten manuscripts, and I've recently founded such taling from as late as 1960s handwritten Primbon, maybe we should say that it is common in printed and handwritten colonial era texts, but not used by contemporary standards." (@adtbayuperdana)
This behaviour is not supported by any browser, and in fact support would require a special algorithm to be defined for line-breaking, however it doesn't appear to be needed in modern Javanese text. Therefore the status for this section ignores that behaviour.
4.3 Text alignment & justification
When text in a paragraph needs to have flush lines down both sides, does it follow the rules for your script? Does the script need assistance to conform to a grid pattern? Does your script allow punctuation to hang outside the text box at the start or end of a line? Where adjustments are need to make a line flush, how is that done? Do you shrink/stretch space between words and/or letters? Are word baselines stretched, as in Arabic? What about paragraph indents, or the need for logical alignment keywords, such as start/end, rather than left/right? See available information or check for currently needed data.
4.4 Letter spacing
Some scripts create emphasis or other effects by spacing out the words, letters or syllables in a word. Are there requirements for this script/language that are unsupported? (For justification related spacing, see below.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
4.5 Lists, counters, etc.
The CSS Counter Styles specification describes a limited set of simple and complex styles for counters to be used in list numbering, chapter heading numbering, etc.The rules plus more counter styles (totalling around 120 for over 30 scripts) are listed in the document Ready-made Counter Styles. Do these cover your needs? Are the details correct? Are there other aspects related to counters and lists that need to be addressed? See available information or check for currently needed data.
4.6 Styling initials
Does the browser or ereader correctly handle special styling of the initial letter of a line or paragraph, such as for drop caps or similar? How about the size relationship between the large letter and the lines alongide? where does the large letter anchor relative to the lines alongside? is it normal to include initial quote marks in the large letter? is the large letter really a syllable? etc. Are all of these things working as expected? See available information or check for currently needed data.
5. Page & book layout
5.1 General page layout & progression
How are the main text area and ancilliary areas positioned and defined? Are there any special requirements here, such as dimensions in characters for the Japanese kihon hanmen? The book cover for scripts that are read right-to-left scripts is on the right of the spine, rather than the left. Is that provided for? When content can flow vertically and to the left or right, how do you specify the location of objects, text, etc. relative to the flow? For example, keywords 'left' and 'right' are likely to need to be reversed for pages written in English and page written in Arabic. Do tables and grid layouts work as expected? How do columns work in vertical text? Can you mix block of vertical and horizontal text correctly? Does text scroll in the expected direction? Other topics that belong here include any local requirements for things such as printer marks, tables of contents and indexes. See available information or check for currently needed data.